It’s time to wahwah (and to halalati…)

So, I finally made it to this year’s next conference, running under the motto “data love”. Due to client meetings in Warsaw and elsewhere, I missed the entire first day of panels – but got into town just in time for the party. That’s where I heard that the companies of two friends came in first and second at the Next Elevator Pitch ’11 – congratulations to Philipp Eibach, founder of wahwah.fm, and Thomas Langenberg, founder of Halalati! They’re operating in quite different fields:wahwah.fm is an upcoming service for streaming the music you listen to on your smartphone or, in their own words: “With wahwah.fm, you listen to your music and broadcast it at the same time. Other wahwah.fm users can tune into your broadcast and hear the exact same music you are listening to. It’s like running your own mobile radio station. Anywhere you are. Anytime you like.” The smartphone app will be released this spring. Philipp’s team won a coaching day at Hanse Ventures in Hamburg, inlcuding SEO, budgeting, social media and team leadership, plus a one semester scholarship at the Founder Institute Berlin (worth 6000 € in total). Do they really need it (they are already supported by an incubator of Deutsche Telekom)? I’m not sure. Halalati, on the other side, is a B2B service for integrating all kind of contests and user participation models into companies’ Facebook pages. The apps ares easy to set up and seem to work very smoothly. Thomas, the founder, is a true social media pioneer: We jointly attended a social networking seminar at Harvard University at the time when Facebook was still a closed shop for Harvard’s college. Halalati won a SEO workshop worth 2500 € – and again, I’m not sure if they really need it. Other companies pitching at Next were: Shopgate, Replydone, Spoovel, Niriu, TrustYou, Scitotec, Newshype, EgoArchive, Storytude and Joinbox.